Many of the GlobeSurfer installations are in remote sites where there is rare or no human presence. The device has to be remotely accessible 24/7 without interruption. A watchdog feature to monitor the connection will highly increase the reliability of the network connection and will decrease the frequency of on site human intervention.

The way it works is that if the modem is not receiving data after a pre-defined idling period, the Connection Watchdog will do domain name look ups to the DNS server of the service provider. If this operation fails, the 3G modem will be reset and the firmware will try to re-establish the connection.

As a complement to the Connection watchdog feature, the remote device control by SMS can further enhance the availability of the device.
In case the GlobeSurfer gets blocked due to unknown reasons, with the existing setup, the only way to remediate the connection is to manually power off and on again. This needs on site human intervention. In case the device can still respond to SMS, this feature can remotely restart the device by sending a SMS with the REBOOT command.

With this feature, the device can also achieve connection on demand through the START and STOP SMS commands. Principal applications are:

Security – network is only accessible by authorized people

Traffic limitation – traffic is only established during desired period